Despite a large amount of psycholinguistic research devoted to the issue of processing differences between a first and a second language, there is no consensus regarding the locus where these emerge or the mechanism behind them. The aim of this article is to briefly examine both the behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in order to critically assess three hypotheses that have been put forward in the literature to explain such differences: the weaker links, executive control, and post-lexical accounts. We conclude that (a) while all stages of processing are likely to be slowed down when speaking in an L2 compared to an L1, the differences seem to originate at a lexical stage; and (b) frequency of use seems to be the variable mainly responsible for these bilingual processing disadvantages.

This work was supported by grants from the Spanish government (PSI2008-01191, Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2007-00012) and the Catalan government (Consolidado SGR 2009-1521), a predoctoral grant from the Catalan government (FI) to Elin Runnqvist and predoctoral grants from the Spanish government (FPU) to Kristof Strijkers and Jasmin Sadat.